The
initial diagnosis was epilepsy of unknown origin and with each passing
year, Jackson watched her son experience multiple types of seizures.
Sometimes during a seizure, Zaki would lose all muscle function and
crash to the floor. Other times, his body stiffened, and he stopped
breathing so long his lips turned blue. Other seizures came so
frequently — hundreds per day — that Zaki stopped eating for days.

“I was definitely helpless, but I was never hopeless,” Jackson says.
“Our job as a parent is to protect our child, but with this, there is
nothing you can do. It’s the worst feeling on the planet.”

“It
felt like they experimented on my child for nearly a decade,” Jackson
says. “There were times I was ready to quit, but the next morning I
picked myself up and said, ‘He is worth the fight.’”

In 2012, Zaki
was receiving hospice palliative services when his mother heard about a
father using cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive oil made from
marijuana plants, to help reduce seizures in his child. She asked her
hospice counselor about the oil.

“She said, ‘I can’t recommend it,’ Jackson says. “And then she gave me a phone number to call.”

That
phone number led Jackson to the Stanley family, five Colorado brothers
who were manufacturing CBD from a special strain of hemp. Jackson gave
Zaki his first dose of the oil, administered by syringe, on July 19,
2012.

“I remember that day as if it were yesterday,” she says. “The
night before, Zaki had had 200 seizures. That night, I stayed awake and
stared at him. He slept through the night for the first time in years.”

Zaki,
who turns 11 in May, was the second child in the United States to try
the oil, now named “Charlotte’s Web” after the first child to use it.